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<concept id="GUID-829761B6-ECF7-5E15-A475-AEE357687067" xml:lang="en"><title>Animation

overview</title><prolog><metadata><keywords/></metadata></prolog><conbody>

<section id="GUID-1FDB9A85-EA5C-4FA9-902C-A2DD7C23EE28"><title>Purpose</title> <p>The animation component is a framework

that provides support to build animated graphics applications. It provides

the basic data types that allow animations to be incorporated into the normal

drawing of a window from the client, or to be managed on the server as a sprite. </p> </section>

<section id="GUID-81E07DE3-E680-410C-A22D-809D72E9CD6D"><title>Required background</title> <p><xref href="GUID-2C443E6F-BC3D-5252-8098-9F850AA88A35.dita">Windows

server</xref> component knowledge is recommended before using this component. </p> </section>

<section id="GUID-DC47F478-274F-4669-AAF4-C6BD04D7D7D1"><title>Key concepts</title> <p>The component has the following key

concepts: </p> <dl>

<dlentry>

<dt>Animation</dt>

<dd><p>The animation is a fairly abstract interface owned by a client application.

The interface is independent of the source of the data it uses, as the data

providers are responsible for providing data to the animation. </p> </dd>

</dlentry>

<dlentry>

<dt>Animator</dt>

<dd><p>The animator represents each data type supported by the animation framework.

It can handle data interpretation, timing and control of the animation. An

animator is not be visible to the owner of the animation, but is controlled

through it using a standard interface. The animators can either reside on

the client or on the server. Each animation selects an animator plug-in to

be used by providing an appropriate string obtained from the data provider. </p> </dd>

</dlentry>

<dlentry>

<dt>Data provider</dt>

<dd><p>A data provider is a generic interface to handle different kinds of

data, which has different structures and behaviours, for example, GIFs and

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Animations access the data providers they

own through an observer interface, which reports events to the animation.

The interface in turn reports these events to the respective animators. </p> </dd>

</dlentry>

<dlentry>

<dt>Observer</dt>

<dd><p>An observer acts as an interface and is responsible for reporting events.

The animation framework provides two such observers: a data provider observer,

and an animation observer. The data provider observer is an interface between

the animation and the data provider. Using this observer the animation can

receive data and events from the data provider. The animation observer is

an interface between the animation and the client application, and is used

to report events to the client application. In Symbian OS v9.1, the animation

observer is implemented to report only errors to the client application. </p> </dd>

</dlentry>

</dl> </section>

<section id="GUID-71398AF6-16D5-4FC5-9342-44304C0A3066"><title>Architectural relationships</title> <p>The animation component

provides a set of abstract classes with some basic functionality required

for any type of animation. Implementors have to derive their own classes using

these abstract classes to support specific animation types such as bitmap

animation, sprite animation and so on. </p> <p>The animation framework also

provides concrete implementations of the abstract classes. The concrete implementations

of the <codeph>CAnimation</codeph> class are: </p> <ul>

<li id="GUID-0E148B3E-F6D0-5AC0-B721-FB3BECD432F7"><p> <b>CBasicAnimation</b>  </p> <p>This

is a client-side animation class which can also act as a data provider observer

and an animation drawer. It provides a bitmap and a mask on which the animation

is submitted. This class establishes a session with the windows server before

submitting the animation to a particular window. </p> </li>

<li id="GUID-4E7B61AF-0FF0-5EBF-A46B-F42D747CF866"><p> <b>CSpriteAnimation</b>  </p> <p>This

is a server-side animation class for sprite based animations. The client has

limited control over the animation, as sprites are server-side graphic objects

and are controlled by the server. This class makes use of the windows server

animation API to submit sprite animations. For more information on these APIs,

refer to <xref href="GUID-2C443E6F-BC3D-5252-8098-9F850AA88A35.dita">Using Window

Server (WSERV)</xref>. </p> </li>

<li id="GUID-3514D632-4090-51BD-AD26-B98CA6B31ADC"><p> <b>CAnimationGroup</b>  </p> <p>This

class is not an animation class by itself, but is a collection of animations

grouped together. It provides access to an array of animation references and

handles all synchronisation issues among the animations in the group, provided

all the animations are of the same type. For example, if a set of client-side

animations are grouped together, they respond to commands collectively in

synchronisation with each other. If the group includes both sprite and client-side

animations, they will respond to commands collectively in asynchronous mode. </p> </li>

</ul> <p>The framework provides the following concrete implementations for

the other two abstract classes, <codeph>CAnimationDataProvider</codeph> and <codeph>CAnimator</codeph>: </p> <ul>

<li id="GUID-C7FB57BB-25C4-5813-9C0A-B71433999EB3"><p> <b>CICLAnimationDataProvider</b>  </p> <p>This

class interprets various data types including animated GIFs using the <xref href="GUID-6B478F86-1EC4-5F78-B7C8-C2E5FCD974B6.dita">Image Conversion Library</xref> (ICL).

It provides data to the animation class in the form of individual frames using

the <codeph>CAnimationFrame</codeph> object which contains a bitmap, a mask,

and frame information. </p> </li>

<li id="GUID-650EDA72-3CC2-5A08-8E6A-F57755B6EEAE"><p> <b>CBitmapAnimator</b>  </p> <p>This

class can handle fixed sequence of bitmap frames passed by the data provider. </p> </li>

</ul> </section>

<section id="GUID-20A5B4F1-586A-4ADC-96C5-E4CF49EC7DA9"><title>API summary</title> <p> </p> <table id="GUID-CA7854D0-7D1C-5BCD-B9E5-A1FB2198AE15">

<tgroup cols="2"><colspec colname="col0" colwidth="0.60*"/><colspec colname="col1" colwidth="1.40*"/>

<thead>

<row>

<entry>Class Name</entry>

<entry>Description</entry>

</row>

</thead>

<tbody>

<row>

<entry><p> <xref href="GUID-40CEAB8C-2202-3E88-929F-35DA5BD554A4.dita"><apiname>CAnimation</apiname></xref>  </p> </entry>

<entry><p>This is an abstract generic class which provides the basic functionality

for all types of animations. </p> </entry>

</row>

<row>

<entry><p> <xref href="GUID-AD71F0EC-EB49-3D46-BEEE-B8ECD30BDDEA.dita"><apiname>CAnimator</apiname></xref>  </p> </entry>

<entry><p>This is an abstract class, which represents each type of data supported

by the animation framework. This class is implemented as an ECOM plug-in. </p> </entry>

</row>

<row>

<entry><p> <xref href="GUID-CB96F59F-BEF9-3296-A80A-4E8E8BE354C6.dita"><apiname>CAnimationDataProvider</apiname></xref>  </p> </entry>

<entry><p>This is an abstract class, which takes the animation data and converts

it into a format recognized by the animator. </p> </entry>

</row>

<row>

<entry><p> <xref href="GUID-12B29886-1D43-37ED-8DC0-6F43D3E591E8.dita"><apiname>CBasicAnimation</apiname></xref>  </p> </entry>

<entry><p>This is a concrete implementation class of the <codeph>CAnimation</codeph> class.

This class is used for basic client-side animations. </p> </entry>

</row>

<row>

<entry><p> <xref href="GUID-6BB621FF-F799-357C-BEAC-9767D68E7D50.dita"><apiname>CSpriteAnimation</apiname></xref>  </p> </entry>

<entry><p>This is a concrete implementation class of the <codeph>CAnimation</codeph> class.

This class is used for sprite animations. </p> </entry>

</row>

</tbody>

</tgroup>

</table> </section>

<section id="GUID-65234329-B7A6-4A07-B32C-BB3B7D161F0C"><title>Typical uses</title> <p><b>Creating a basic animation </b> </p><p>The

animation framework can be used to create a basic client-side animation using

the <codeph>CBasicAnimation</codeph> class. You can also have your own implementation

for other type of animations. For more information, refer to <xref href="GUID-A97AD7EB-43C2-545A-9756-57D65A4905D9.dita">How

to create a basic animation</xref>. </p> <p><b>Creating a sprite animation </b> </p><p>The

animation framework supports server-side sprite animations using the <codeph>CSpriteAnimation</codeph> class.

The procedure to create a sprite animation is the same as that for creating

a basic client-side animation. The only difference between a client-side animation

and a sprite animation is that client-side animations are redrawn by the client

application. Whereas, for sprite animations redraws are handled automatically,

as they run in the window server's high priority thread. </p> </section>

</conbody><related-links>

<link href="GUID-A97AD7EB-43C2-545A-9756-57D65A4905D9.dita"><linktext>How to create

a basic animation</linktext></link>

<link href="GUID-0C4B86B5-530A-5839-86C1-46E7ABE281E0.dita"><linktext>Using Window

Server (WSERV)</linktext></link>

</related-links></concept>